I'll admit it: I was originally hesitant about "Mad Men", and it wasn't until my third attempt to watch Season 1 that I made it through. The first two times, I stopped watching because I felt the same kind of uneasiness that makes "Office Space" something less than one of my favorite movies. I felt it was just too realistic a portrayal of white-collar work - it hit too close to home. I don't like it when pop culture makes me feel that my life is meaningless, and I was worried that "Mad Men" was going to make me think that my life was meaningless.Like always, my initial impression was wrong. To me, what makes "Mad Men" awesome is that it makes me realize that everyone's life is meaningless, regardless of their levels of wealth, beauty, and outward-looking happiness. And also the following, other things:
1) Making smoking look cool again. Because all the Surgeon General's warning shit hadn't happened yet in 1960, everybody on "Mad Men" smokes. (*ASIDE: Because of stupid Hollywood rules, the actors are only allowed to smoke herbal cigarettes on the show. This is ridiculous because it's not the fact that it's a Marlboro that makes smoking dangerous; it's the fact that smoke inhaled into the lungs causes a bunch of health problems. It doesn't matter if it's tobacco, herbs, cloves, hookah, bong, or whatever toots your noodle -- it's bad for you.) This reminds us all that, despite the obvious health hazards, smoking makes everyone look cooler.
I quit smoking cigarettes years ago, and haven't lapsed once since. Recently at a company event, my girlfriend, who ordinarily doesn't smoke, smoked a few cigarettes. When she told me this, it pissed me off -- not because I care that she smoked a few cigarettes (I suspect she won't get hooked), but because I'm incredibly jealous that I could never stop at just one cigarette. I would have 10 Marlboro Lights down within an hour, because they're delicious, they make me look cooler than I am, and because smokers have better random conversations with people. I also kind of blame "Mad Men" for this.
2) The 1960's are an invisible character on the show. A temporal context shouldn't feel like a character, but in "Mad Men" it does. The 1960's were a time of incredible change and turmoil, and you get the sense after watching a few episodes of the show that the world was a cultural powderkeg at that precise moment. Everything was about to change, and everyone seemed to sense this in a very vague sense. The old guard was about to become irrelevant, replaced by a younger generation with radically different ideas about stuff. Somewhere in the middle (both in age and in ideology) is Don Draper, who is fighting always to maintain his own identity. I have no clue where he'll end up, but I'm sure it won't be pretty.
3) Who is Don Draper? No, seriously, who is he? I'm only less than halfway through Season 2, and I can't figure it out yet. As far as I know, no successful TV show has managed to base an ensemble drama around a main character who has no past. Artsy movies like "Memento" have pulled this off (kinda), but on TV? No frickin' way, man. There's a lot of stupid TV out there, but "Mad Men" is the kind of show you can feel smart about watching.
4) It reminds you that being at the right place at the right time is extremely important. Don Draper, like a dinosaur at the dawn of the Ice Age, is going to become culturally irrelevant at some point during "Mad Men" -- it hasn't happened yet, but it will at some point. Mark my words; Don Draper is not going to go gently into that good night. This is a shame, because his personality would have been a perfect fit for the generation just before his own. Other characters on the show, such as Salvatore and Peggy Olson, have personalities that would be perfect fits for the generation just after their own. These people will not be as successful as they would have been, had they been born just 20 years sooner or 20 years later.
I get the sense that this is the case for lots of people. For instance, I am convinced that, had I been born in 1973 instead of in 1983, and had every other aspect of my childhood been exactly the same as it was, I would be a 35-year-old, insanely successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur instead of a 25-year-old, moderately successful Project Director. My life right now is happy, but I've always had the sense that I was born at the wrong time.
5) The overall portrayal of work juxtaposed with "What Life is Supposed to Mean." I mentioned at the beginning of this post that "Mad Men" reminded me too much of "Office Space", which I said is probably why it took so long for me to get hooked on the show. Now it's one of my favorite aspects of the show. Every single character on the show is both vaguely miserable and morally compromised. Marital fidelity is the exception, not the rule. Account managers at Sterling Cooper would sell their own mothers down the river for the next big deal.
Everyone -- even the Mad Men whose job it is to construct artificial realities for people -- are striving to obtain an artificially-constructed reality, which must include a smiling wife, two kids and a dog. What "happiness" is is never mentioned, because no one on the show can even come close to understanding it.
6) Misogyny and the overall objectification of women. Don't get me wrong; I feel like women are (at the very least) the equal of men. In fact, I think women make better bosses than men do, for a bunch of reasons that aren't worth elaborating here. This doesn't mean that I can't find the fact that it wasn't always like this hilarious.
In "Mad Men", a show with a writing staff comprised mostly of women, women are almost always the secretaries. In addition, they will always be the secretaries, and their careers have one of two possible endings. They will end up either as head secretaries, or as housewives. They will fetch coffee for their bosses and hang up their (expensive, stylish, and awesome) overcoats. They will type and take correspondence, and they will conceal their bosses' inevitable affairs. They will answer to things like "Sweetheart" and even "Sweetcheeks." Men will crack hilarious jokes at their expense, which leads me to the next (and final) item...
7) Extremely high levels of quotability. In addition to dozens of snide lines directed at women (watch the focus group scene from Season 1 -- each line is better than the one that precedes it), Don Draper's often asks his wife and his bosses, "What do you want me to say?" The quintessential middle manager, his job is to please. There's significance here, but I'll leave it up to you to watch the show and figure out what it is.
He also uttered my favorite line of the show, "I have a life, and it only moves in one direction: forward." (I realize that if you haven't seen the show, these lines may lack some context. You'll help yourself greatly by watching the first two seasons on DVD, preferably before Sunday night, when Season 3 begins on AMC.)
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My dad, having obtained a reasonable level of professional success and financial flexibility, decided to retire a few years ago at age 58.
Since then, he's gotten to know the guy who delivers the mail and he goes for walks on the beach every day. He serves on a couple of directorial boards and travels a few times a year, but basically he lives the life of a Floridian retiree --he has a very nice lawn, since he's now obsessed with mowing it approximately every two days.
On a visit last year, I was struggling with not really liking being a graduate student. I never felt comfortable with the Kabuki dance of academia, the idea of a lifetime spent struggling like academics struggle, and numerous other aspects of my career at that time. However, because I was a good student and a good researcher, I felt I could make it through until the Ph.D. (at that point).
I think I was trying to convince myself that sticking around to get the Ph.D. was a good idea when I started to think out loud, listing all the benefits of obtaining the degree to my Dad. When I ended with "...and at the end, I'll finally get some kind of peace of mind," my Dad responded with, "I don't think you'll ever find peace of mind."
But hey, at least my life has only direction, and that's moving forward.
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